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Tuesday, 17 April 2012

Sorry for the long absence, and lack of comments on your blogs, but big changes are afoot in casa de Laura and I have literally not had time to stop this past few weeks.

Due to my boyfriend getting a shiny new job, we are going to be relocating to Bristol in the next month or so!I’m very excited about moving to the west country, but at the moment I don’t have a new job lined up, or a place to live, or any friends in Bristol, so things are very much crazy hectic.

I’m looking forward to exploring my new local area, and if anyone has any recommendations for good sewing shops, craft cafes or sewing teachers / schools in Bristol or Bath (or anywhere nearby) please let me know!

I’ll admit, because of this, sewing has not been top of my list of priorities recently. A couple of months ago I did buy a overlocker, with big plans to make zillions of jersey garments, which sadly did not happen. The poor thing has been stuck on my desk literally gathering dust! Lucikly, I had also signed up to a a 2 day overlocker course, and the first class was yesterday.Initially we just got to grips with the basics; the first thing we had to do was cut the threads off and learn how to re-thread our machines from scratch!!That was a bit scary, and actually quite tricky (even though the teacher told me my model was actually one of the easier machines to thread), but once I’d done it a couple of times I had it figured out.Definitely need to get some good tweezers for the fiddly bits though!

My new baby

We then re-threaded using different coloured threads, so we clearly saw what each thread was doing in the stitching it created.

Next we made little samples increasing and decreasing tension on the loopers and needle thread, moving the blade plate further away and closer to the needle plate and changing the stitch length.

We also had a practice at sewing curves and swerving the fabric on and off the overlocker.

We each got given a customised vest pattern, which we are cutting out at home and then sewing up next week.We are also going to learn an easy way to rethread, and how to attach elastic to fabric via the overlocker, and hopefully how to use the rolled hem feature.

I have to say I am not scared of my overlocker now, nor of a thread breaking and having to re-thread the machine.